There's Some Good News. As printed in the Federal Register on Tuesday, July 27, 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office has decided to expand its exemption to allow educators and their students the right to legally bypass CSS encryption on movie DVDs. This is a major victory for those of us (myself included) who petitioned for the exemption to be expanded.
The Copyright Office ruled that college professors and film/media studies students are entitled to bypass CSS encryption to make documentaries and remix videos if they are engaged in "comment and criticism." That's great news for media literacy scholars in the fields of education, communications and literature! But undergraduate students in sociology, physics or literature are not entitled to this exemption, however, presumably because the Register of Copyrights believes that only students learning professional media skills are entitled to manipulate high-quality clips or engage in critical analysis of movies.
Now for the bad news: K-12 educators and their students are not entitled to the exemption -- unless they read the fine print of the ruling.
Let them Eat Screen Capture. The Register of Copyright believes that K-12 educators don't need such high quality images for their students. The Register states that K-12 teachers could find other legal ways to make clips, like using free online screen capture software like Jing or Screentoaster--- of course, these tools limit them to very short clips. For longer clips, after they buy a legal copy of a movie they want to use in class, they will need to purchase expensive software like Camtasia if they want to use two excerpts from the different versions of the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene for a media literacy lesson. You can read more at the U.S. Copyright Office. At least the Copyright Office has clarified that screen capture is a legal option for fair use purposes.
Rights for All Who Make Non-Commercial Videos. For K-12 teachers and their students who need to use high-quality clips for videos they want to submit to festivals and for public screenings, the Register of Copyright offers a powerful option. The ruling offers a special exemption to people who make non-commercial videos, enabling them to rip movie clips from copy-protected DVDs if they're using it for comment and criticism and if they genuinely need the higher-quality images. Presumably, any K-12 teacher or student is entitled to this exemption. That is terriic news! So in the end, the Register of Copyright has offered an important ruling that truly supports the good work of educators who are using mass media, popular culture and digital media to support critical thinking and communication skills.
There are more implications and "next steps" we must take in responding to the decision that I will be discussing here in the next days-- stay tuned.
At the World Summit in Karlstad, Sweden, I was able to share our current work analyzing different approaches to teaching about the news to urban children ages 7 - 11 at this afternoon's research presentation, which was sponsored by NORDICOM, the Nordic Information Center for Media Communication and Research. I developed this project with Media Education Lab colleagues John Landis and Henry Cohn-Geltner. Here's a summary:
Politics, crime, the representation of gender, race and social class are constructed each day through news and current events.
Media literacy offers tools and opportunities for children to not only use and analyze but also to respond actively to news messages. Previous research shows that news media production activities may support the development of communication skills but not lead to progression in critical thinking about news media for children under age 13. To explore this issue, this article presents three examples of lessons and activities used in urban elementary school where news analysis and production activities were used with children. In one case, Grade 3 students produced an original newscast as a means to understand the conventions and production processes in television news. See the newscast they created. With a group of fourth graders,entertainment news coverage pop star Chris Brown's domestic violence trial wasused to focus on the informative and persuasive content of news and the meaning of celebrity. See a video of the students' mock-trial in action. In Grade 5, children share their suspicion and distrust of television news by directly advocating for change in the media by addressing mainstream news producers with a student-authored list of grievances. See the video students made to record their written letter. Watch them read aloud their advocacy letter, which they hand-delivered to the local news channel in Philadelpia.
These three case studies of classroom practice are used to present an expanded model of medialiteracy competencies for elementary-level children using the concept of empowerment and including the practices of engaging, locating, comprehending, analyzing,evaluating, communicating and taking action. We noticed that none of these lessons included a focus on locating information, which raises questions about the need to include more careful attention to search and retrieval activities with children using the news media. However this research reveals that through a structured sequence of learning activities, children strengthened comprehension of events in their community and the world around them, developed a vocabulary for critical analysis, analyzed the content and ethical issues presented in media, and engaged inreal-world advocacy efforts to “talk back” to newsmakers and others involved inthe construction of news.
Look for our scholarly article on this project coming soon in an upcoming Nordicom publication!
I was honored to be able to make one of the four opening addresses at the World Summit on Media for Children and Youth on June 14, 2010 in the lovely city of Karlstad, Sweden. Per Lundren, the Director of the World Summit has been planning this amazing conference for a couple of years -- and I am so delighted to be participating in this groundbreaking event! In my talk, I noted the power of a simple metaphor for newcomers to the field. As they participate in the conference, they will need to keep in mind the coin, with its two sides.
Advocates for children and media bring forward the goal of "protection" as we aim to reduce the potentially harmful effects of mass media on children and young people, including issues related to materialism and hyperconsumption, gender and racial stereotypes, body image, media violence, attentional issues and multitasking, problems in determining the credibility of messages, cyberbullying, pornography, and online social responsibility. It's one side of the coin.
Media producers and media literacy educators bring the goal of "empowerment" as we aim to help kids learn from the skillful blend of entertainment and information that is available through more and more diverse channels. Children and youth are empowered by easy access to digital technologies which are increasingly transparent, open-source, and easy to use. With these tools, they can be authors of media messages that can reach large audiences and potentially change the world. They are empowered when they can go "behind the scenes," developing critical thinking skills about the constructed nature of media messages. It's another side of the coin.
When you look carefully at one side of a coin, you can't look at the back side at the same time. This blindness is manifest in some of the "great debates" in our field, where we get annoyed when others don't see the same side of the coin that we're looking at. Today, media literacy education aims to address both protection and empowerment, maximizing the powerful benefits of the empowerment potential of mass media, popular culture and digital media, while minimizing the potentially destructive and inhumane components through critical analysis, discussion and learning.
Thank goodness that the World Summit addresses both sides of the empowerment-protection coin! This conference brings together the full range of perspectives on the complex and multi-facted role of children, media and youth. I am looking forward to the more than 200 presentations from people in 40 countries and over 1100 delegates to see more how they make sense of the empowerment-protection dynamic in the context of particular cultures and lived experiences. Stay tuned for more updates-- and let the conference begin!
We are very proud of Eugene Martin's upcoming film, The Anderson Monarchs, which examines the lives of African-American girls in Philadelphia who play soccer. Take a look at the trailer:
We're looking forward to screening and discussing the trailer with children enrolled in the Powerful Voices for Kids program--- what a great opportunity to meet with the filmmaker and learn how documentaries are created, why audiences love them, how they represent the people and places that matter to us, and how they can help change the world!
Think it's great that the FCC is involved in media literacy? Well, we're not convinced --
A Review from the Media Education Lab
Admongo (www.admongo.gov) A free interactive online game for children ages 8 – 12. Washington DC: Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with Scholastic, Inc.
By David Cooper Moore and Renee Hobbs
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has had a long and complicated relationship with advertising targeted at children. In the 1970s, when the FTC first explored regulating advertising of products targeted to young children, their work was stymied by pressure from the business community. Congress then revised the commission’s mandate in ways that limited their ability to regulate advertising to children (Jordan, 2008). But now the FTC is now taking steps to promote advertising literacy in the classroom with Admongo, an online multimedia edutainment game and curriculum designed in collaboration with Scholastic. The program is designed to teach children ages 8 to 12 basic principles of advertising literacy, including increasing awareness of types of advertising, understanding ad techniques, and examining methods of targeting audiences. Today, young people are exposed to increasingly pervasive media messages from a wide variety of sources that go far beyond television advertising. To reflect the changing media systems that young people are growing up with, the Admongo curriculum also explores online advertising, viral marketing, text message ads, product placement, and advergaming.
The centerpiece of the Admongo program is an elaborate online edutainment game, visually resembling the online multiplayer game, Poptropica. Children create an avatar and then begin their journey by finding advertisements hidden throughout the game. Along the way, they collect coins and beat baddies in a search for ads in the outside world and in the home. The Admongo game may be used by children in a school computer lab or assigned for homework.
The program also offers three complementary lesson plans designed for use in school: (1) Ad Awareness, where children find many different types of advertising in their home and community, including catalogs and ads on busses; (2) Ad Targeting and Techniques, where children learn strategies that are used to attract and hold attention; and (3) Ad Creation, where children discover how specific strategies are matched to meet the interests of certain demographic groups. To conclude the learning experience, there is also a final reflection activity and quiz. Each lesson relies on some classroom discussion, but also provides simple worksheets, a sample of “fake” print, TV, and online ads, and a vocabulary list.
Questions of representation-reality, values, ethics, and the real-world impact of marketing are unavoidable when exploring advertising literacy with children. Eight to twelve-year-olds can understand how advertising can be deceptive, flattering and overpromising in ways that promote greed and materialism. They can recognize that ads conflate products with deeper human needs, making products seem more important than other social values to the detriment of the individual and the society. But the Admongo curriculum steers far away from these deeper issues, and instead reduces advertising literacy to its most non-controversial and fundamental level: building advertising awareness.
The Use of Fake Ads
Admongo doesn’t make use of Starburst, T-Mobile, Cheetos, Snickers, or Coke ads in the online game or in the curriculum materials. Instead, it uses a variety of “fake” advertisements for soft drinks, movies, videogames, deodorant and cereal, which are approximations of popular advertising genres. These seem familiar yet are oddly abstracted from children's lived experiences. Children are intimately familiar with specific brands, and can often identify brand logos before they have developed basic print literacy skills (Young, 1990). These strong brand associations present both a powerful learning opportunity and a potential setback to an advertising literacy program. The use of real ads could provide an opportunity to make a real-world connection that may help children investigate their direct relationships with existing brands and link abstract concepts of targeting an audience and persuasion techniques to the way that they actually desire and consume these products.
Real ads pose a disadvantage, however, that Admongo creators may have considered in their decision to use artificial ads for nonexistent products. Like other forms of popular media, children form strong personal bonds to their favored brands. Brand loyalty, when explicitly challenged, may result in disengaged behavior, such as that which occurs when critiquing a favorite television show, film, or piece of music. Children may experience outright disengagement and resentment or mere parroting of the teacher’s desired responses (Buckingham, 2003). In addition, if the Admongo program used real ads, critics might complain that it was promoting products while teaching advertising literacy.
However, a robust advertising literacy program should engage directly with children’s actual experiences with ads in order to help with the transfer of skills from the classroom to the realm of private consumption. This process is difficult even when children are taught to be more conscious and critical of advertising effects (Buckingham; 2003; Van Evra, 2004). Admongo’s creators strike a middle ground, suggesting that teachers bring in outside ad material from real newspapers and magazines while supplying them with “fake” ads, which may be seen as a safer, less controversial choice.
Recite and Absorb
Despite the game platform’s interactivity, the online learning experience is quite passive. For example, in level one, when a player comes across an ad, a narrated screen first presents information about the advertisement and then asks a multiple choice question based on the conveyed information. There are no consequences for getting the answer wrong. The learning is truly incidental to the game play. In addition, Admongo lesson plans rely on passive “banking”-type instruction techniques, through which teachers recite and students absorb information. There is little evidence of the use of instructional practices that promote critical thinking. In the Ad Awareness lesson, teachers are provided with simple definitions of advertising to impart to their students. But these definitions range from problematic to disingenuous. The lesson encourages teachers to “explain that advertising gives people information to help them decide what to buy.” This is the role of a consumer report, not advertising. Teachers are instructed to “tell students that advertisers are required by law to tell the truth, and that most advertisers work hard to do this.” Without further elaboration, this potentially mischaracterizes the purpose of advertising—which is fundamentally about persuasion—and conflates persuasion with information. For many of the readers of the Journal of Media Literacy Education, this approach might be hard to swallow.
The National Association for Media Literacy Education emphasizes the importance of identifying what is omitted from a media message as one of media literacy's key questions (NAMLE, 2007) but in Admongo's definition of advertising, the fact that “leaving out” is often synonymous with disingenuousness is never addressed. Without frankly addressing omission and omission's relationship to truth, the curriculum ignores a major component of how and why advertising works—a component directly responsible for developing critical interpretation or understanding.
Lacking a strong critical foundation, the FTC’s approach advertising literacy essentially rewards students for identifying successful advertising. Students are expected to recognize technique, but are not encouraged to constructively question the values implicit in those techniques. Constructive criticism does not necessarily mean portraying advertising negatively, but it must involve a range of perspectives and an introduction of the role of judgment into a meaningful discussion.
For example, in an activity designed to introduce “Ad Targeting and Techniques,” students examine a fictional advertisement for women's designer clothing and are then asked to “change it to appeal to kids your age.” The more complex media messages regarding the ad's representation of its subjects and the values associated with portraying this particular media message for its target demographic are absent. Instead, children vindicate or ignore these embedded messages by simply replicating them in their own creative style.
The Elusive Production Process
The Admongo online game and curriculum address the concept of message production in a rather superficial way. Though students are asked to construct their own approximations of advertisements on paper, there is no discussion of how advertisements are created in the real world, through careful design planning, digital photo manipulation, casting, photo shoots, etc. For example, when asked to create their own original ad in Lesson 3, students are asked to target their ad for breakfast cereal to “space aliens.” The abstraction of a target audience in this outlandish scenario cuts off potential for meaningful discussion about the social and ethical issues at sake in targeting specific audiences. Suppose, instead, that children were asked to market a highly-sugared cereal to different demographic groups, including members of their own school, their grandparents, or their older and younger siblings. In the FTC’s lesson, children are merely rewarded for their creative inventiveness, without getting to the root of what, as an advertiser, it is their job to do. Though students are told that advertisements exist to sell products, the consequences of advertising are limited to the effectiveness of the ad in reaching its target.
When done well, the production process aims to be “invisible” to consumers—particularly young consumers with no real experience in media production. Knowing that an advertisement is made for a particular audience is crucial, but equally important is knowing how it was made for that audience. When children better understand the creation process, they are also better equipped to think critically about why certain production decisions may have been made.
The Missing Audience
The FTC’s online game and curriculum focuses primarily on recognizing advertising in the social environment, indentifying persuasive techniques, and understanding target audiences. What seems to be fundamentally absent from the curriculum, though, is a meaningful engagement with students themselves as an audience—highlighting their lived experiences with advertisements and using their own values and opinions to drive deeper understanding of how advertising works.
Students have countless experiences with advertisements that are correlated with judgments—of advertisers, of products, of their own experiences as consumers. Engaging these judgments by activating lived experiences is one way to ensure that the skills they learn in school are transferred to their everyday lives. Students should discuss how they feel about an advertisement, whether they agree with the advertisement or not, and whether or not the advertisement really “worked” on them. Teachers can encourage students to visualize other audiences and how the message might affect them differently. In one Admongo lesson, students are asked to redesign an advertisement for a new target audience, but there is no discussion of the implications of marketing the product to this new audience. Do students think that this product should be advertised to a younger audience? Why or why not? Students can use their knowledge of younger siblings and friends, say, to consider potential responses of other audiences. This helps children to articulate a set of personal values about the ethical and social responsibilities of an advertiser.
The Impact of Ads in Shaping Desire
Admongo’s interactive game and classroom lessons omit the one perspective that is most crucial in transferring skills from the classroom to the world outside: considering the impact of the message on its recipients. In each of the FTC’s framing questions, the emphasis is either on an ad creator (“who is responsible for the ad?”) or on the content of the advertisement itself (“what is the ad actually saying?” and “what does the ad want me to do?”) But missing here is the role of the consumer—how do I feel about this ad? Do I want to do what the ad wants me to do? How might another person feel differently about this ad? Without these crucial questions that directly engage the lived experiences of students, advertising literacy becomes an abstracted experience that may not transfer in any meaningful way to students' ad-saturated lives. The simplest value judgments—good and bad, worthy and unworthy, truthful and deceitful—are not consciously engaged in discussion in any meaningful way. Teachers who are familiar with media literacy pedagogy will recognize this omission instantly; but it’s possible that educators who are less familiar with media literacy might not.
Identifying omission is a central concept in media literacy education—it is through recognizing what is left out of media messages that we begin to more fully understand the processes and decisions through which advertising media is made. Whenever students are asked to identify advertising techniques, there should be a concerted effort to understand what is not in the advertisement. What isn’t the advertisement telling you about the product that you might need to know? Who isn’t an ad targeting and why was that audience left out.
For years, teachers have done this quite simply by connecting the child’s lived experience of a product to the claims its advertisement makes. By age 7 or so, children recognize that the product does not live up to its hype (Young, 1990). Children realize, “The ad suggests that the shoes make you jump higher, but I don’t jump any higher in these shoes than in my other shoes.” The FTC’s omission of deception and distortion in advertising and its refusal to examine the difference between representation and reality is glaring.
Currently the only assessment tool in the Admongo curriculum is a brief quiz in which students choose from multiple-choice options. The FTC has an opportunity to engage in meaningful discussion and reflection by asking children to actively transfer their knowledge back outside of the classroom, by giving them tasks to be completed not just in the classroom but in the world. A true test of advertising literacy would function much like a driving test does for teenagers seeking a license—students would be asked to apply their knowledge in everyday experiences to demonstrate that the concepts they have learned in the classroom can be of use outside of the classroom. Students should be asked to participate in individual and group reflection, applying concepts learn to their real-world experiences with advertisements, then sharing this information with a class to see how different students were able to use these skills differently, depending on the advertising media they encountered.
What’s Omitted: Why Was this Curriculum Created?
It’s only natural for the reader to wonder about the FTC's own motivations for developing an advertising literacy curriculum. Clearly, the focus of the curriculum emphasizes the many new and varied forms of advertising, especially those newer forms of advertising found in the online and digital media environment, as in text messages, video games, and ring tones. In Admongo, the FTC teaches children: “One government agency works to protect consumers from being hurt by advertising. This agency is called the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC.” The FTC implicitly acknowledges its own role as author of the curriculum, but its self-referentiality also seems calculated to circumscribe the ways in which the role of government regulation can be brought into discussion.
The essential paradox of the Admongo curriculum is that while the FTC views advertising to be a potentially pernicious influence on children, nothing in the curriculum offers the opportunity for this influence to actually manifest itself in the classroom. The FTC claims that young consumers must be “protected” from advertising, but there is no indication in the classroom activities that there are real-world consequences for not understanding how advertising works.
These real-world consequences open up a range of interconnected issues that seem inextricable from a well-rounded advertising literacy program. One of the most obvious of these consequences is advertising’s impact on childhood nutrition, as advertising targeted at children ages 8 to 12 typically encourages the consumption of grossly unhealthy—and quite directly and immediately harmful—food products. Though citizen activist groups have successfully lobbied to end the most egregious junk food and programming crossovers on television, such as cartoon shows starring junk food mascots (Nestle, 2007), such efforts have done little to put a dent in the industry of junk food advertising. Excluding an advertisement's omissions or dishonesty from the overall conversation about advertising precludes a discussion of whether or not there are demonstrably harmful products that should or should not be marketed to particular age groups.
Finally, a key question that remains after exploring the Admongo curriculum is what the FTC feels is its purpose in promoting advertising literacy, especially in relation to the commission’s more recent efforts in regulating food and alcohol advertising as well as advertising for violent videogames and movies. The FTC makes the claim to teachers and parents that the FTC “protects consumers by educating them about advertising and how it works.” But teachers who are invited to use the curriculum receive no explanation of the context of this work. No information is provided to explain the FTC’s history with children’s advertising regulation nor is there any real discussion of why the FTC feels it is important to build children’s understanding of advertising. Enrolling educators in the larger political, economic, social and cultural context of the issue of advertising to children would seem to be a natural way not just to get teacher “buy-in,” but to demonstrate respect for teachers’ own motivations and values in making the decision to teach advertising literacy to students in elementary and middle-school.
About the Authors
David Cooper Moore is the Curriculum Director of the Powerful Voices for Kids program and a graduate student in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University. Renee Hobbs is the Founder of the Media Education Lab at Temple University.
Buckingham, David (2003). Media Education. London: Polity.
Federal Trade Commission (2010). Admongo. Retrieved Feubrary 1, 2010 from http://admongo.gov
Jordan, Amy (2008). Children’s media policy. The Future of Children 18(1), 235 - 249.
NAMLE (2007). Core principles of media literacy education in the United States. Retrieved January 27, 2010 from http://www.namle.net/core-principles/namle-cpmle-w-questions.pdf
Nestle, Marion (2007). Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Van Evra, Judith (2004). Television and Child Development. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Young, Brian (1990). Television Advertising and Children. London: Clarendon Press.
 Admongo (2010). Lesson 1: Ad Awareness. Retrieved April 25, 2010 from http://www.admongo.gov/curriculum-lesson-1.aspx
 Admongo (2010). Lesson X: XXX Retrieved April 25, 2010 from http://www.admongo.gov/
 Admongo (2010). Lesson 3: Ad Creation. Retrieved April 25, 2010 from http://www.admongo.gov/curriculum-lesson-3.aspx
 Admongo (2010). Lesson 1: Ad Awareness. Retrieved April 25, 2010 from http://www.admongo.gov/curriculum-lesson-1.aspx
 Admongo (2010). Lesson 1: Ad Awareness. Retrieved April 25, 2010 from http://www.admongo.gov/curriculum-lesson-1.aspx
On March 2, we had the remarkable good fortune to meet with FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, the first African-American female commissioner ever, to discuss the FCC's notice of inquiry on media literacy and proposed rule making on net neutrality. Commissioner Clyburn has spent a lifetime in public service work in her home state of South Carolina. She is deeply committed to reducing the digital divide and increasing opportunities for minority ownership in media industries.See our video about the highlights of our experience in Washington that features Sherri Hope Culver and myself along with Kristen Riccard and Kellen Clemens, our student attorneys from the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic at American University's Washington College of Law.
The FCC is poised to make a real contribution to support the development of media education, by helping parents, educators and children and young people better understand the media environment in which they live. Some people may wonder about the connection between media literacy and net neutrality. For us, net neutrality is an essential prerequisite in order for media literacy education to thrive.
Empowering and Protecting Children and Youth. When the FCC issued its notice of inquiry on protecting and empowering children in an evolving media landscape, we noticed that their language tended to use the term media literacy in a confusing and blurry way. We think it's important to emphasize the difference between media management and media literacy. Media literacy includes both the ability to critically analyze media and the ability to create media messages in many forms. Traditionally, media literacy educators have emphasized exploration of news, advertising, media ownership, and issues of representation in popular culture. Now educators are exploring how media literacy concepts and pedagogy apply to digital technologies and online social media. Sometimes the two concepts together are referred to as "digital and media literacy." For children and young people, media literacy offers a form preparation and empowerment for life in contemporary society.
The term media management refers to parental monitoring and control of access to media and technology and to some types of media content in order to ensure that media use supports healthy child development. The goals of media management are to protect children against risk, counteract negative media effects, and promote a healthy lifestyle through restriction, limiting, or monitoring media
While valuable, we don't think that these approaches are as effective as media literacy. The FCC can play an important role in helping broadcasters, the cable industry and Internet service providers to increase the visibility of media and digital literacy to communities across the United States.
Preserving the Open Internet. We're aware that a free and open Internet is critical to the development of innovative learning methods used by educators, students and interactive media developers. An open Internet is indispensable to helping students develop the competencies they need to be effective in the 21st century.
There are two key issues in the FCC's proposed rulemaking: nondiscrimination and transparency. Educators, parents, children and youth rely on commercial service providers for access to all of these educational resources. Those of us who create and access online content are subject to the network management practices of service providers.
We think it's important for service providers to disclose their network management practices. Without regulation, a service provider could block, slow, or divert Internet content related to the educational process. We told the Commissioner about our experience this past summer at Powerful Voices for Kids, a media literacy and technology integration program. We experienced some challenges in hosting the program in an urban elementary school that, while it had "pipe to the door," did not have the robust level of wireless bandwidth we needed for students and teachers to be able to engage in meaningful media analysis and production activities using streaming video, Flip video cameras, wikis and simple game development tools. This example demonstrates that "Internet access" does not necessarily mean access to the full content available online, and only through increased transparency will educators and students be able to work with service providers to receive the bandwidth they need for learning.
Commercial service providers control the flow and speed of content over their network. In managing their network, ISPs could "dial down" the service they provide to schools during the summer. Without transparency regulations, we might face a situation where our summer work in urban schools could be seriously compromised-- with Internet service as slow as molasses in wintertime. We wouldn't have a clue about the problem. If ISPs have to disclose their network management practices, then we can understand why we're experiencing slowed service. We can reach out to the company to address the problem. Under the best tenets of capitalism, transparency promotes effective communication between users and providers. It's simply good business.
If we are unable to discern how, and by whom, the flow of Internet content is controlled, we are limited in our work as educators. Media literacy educators can teach about the Internet if the principles of nondiscrimination and transparency continue to support the creation and flow of digital content.
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Wes Fryer's website, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, offers fascinating insights on K-12 education and technology integration. It's one of the "must-read" blogs in our field. On January 11, Wes posted a fascinating article reflecting on a particular situation involving the misuse of media in the classroom. To his chagrin, Wes discovered that his son, who is a middle-school student, will be watching 10 popular children's films in his Leadership class. Films include Mulan, Toy Story 1 and 2, and the Bee Movie, among others. When the permission letter came home, authorizing parental permission for viewing full-length movies, Wes wondered about the issue, writing, "It seems like a GREAT idea for a teacher to use excerpts and clips from movies to illustrate leadership principles and concepts, but it does NOT seem legit to show ten full length DVD movies in class to ostensibly achieve this same purpose."
He invited his many readers to reflect on the legal and pedagogical issues involved, and asked "What Would Renee Hobbs Do?" How very flattering! Thanks, Wes! So here's my two cents:
1. It's legal. Section 110 of the Copyright Act of 1976 authorizes teachers to use whole films for educational purposes. Surprisingly, one of the teachers on Wes Fryer's website noted that his school actually pays license fees to view this type of videos. (That may be needed if the film is used for entertainment purposes, like an evening fundraising event.) But when films are used for an educational purpose, Section 110 covers this practice 100%. Even if you use 10 or more movies in a semester, there's no need to pay license fees.
2. Is it educationally sound? That's the real issue. Please take a look at my article from Learning, Media and Technology, entitled "Non-Optimal Uses of of Video in the Classroom" to see just how common this practice is in K-12 environments. (Sadly, it's a bit of a problem at the college level, too.) Film is a powerful tool for learning. But too many teachers use it as a crutch, to fill time or as a substitute for genuine instruction. My research showed that many teachers use video and mass media in superficial and routine ways without much explicit reflection on their educational aims and goals. In my article, I offer a typology of misuses based on the observations and interviews I conducted.
While film and video use is common in American public schools, many teachers have not fully thought through their own educational goals and objectives for using these materials. Many of the educators who contributed to Wes Fryer's blog post agreed, noting the colossal waste of time involved, given students' extreme familiarity with these texts.
in many cases, a carefully-selected 10-minute clip from these videos would be more than adequate to launch a meaningful discussion. Media literacy educators might also ask students to watch videos at home and select scenes for themselves that reflect a key idea. Students could make oral presentations where they play a short clip they have selected themselves and talk about it, applying a key concept.
3. How do educators or students make a clip reel? Under the doctrine of fair use, teachers and students are legally allowed to make film clip compilations. But it's hard to do this ever since the VHS tape disappeared. In my testimony to the U.S. Copyright Office on May 6, 2009, I note this irony, explaining that the rise of the DVD player has inadvertently made it more difficult to use film in educationally sound ways in the classroom. Why? Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's illegal to bypass the encryption codes on DVDs which "lock up" the content. This discourages educators from using excerpts and promotes the time-wasting practice of watching whole films. On behalf of educators and students, I've asked the Copyright Office to grant an exemption that would make it legal for educators and students to "rip" DVDs for educational purposes. We'll find out sometime soon if this exemption is granted.Stay tuned!
3. How best to engage in dialogue with teachers about misuses of film? In his blog post, Wes recognizes the need to say something to the teacher. It's important to decide how and when to do this -- and how to do it in a way that leads to teacher growth and development. I raised this issue with my kids' teachers -- and discovered for myself that it can be complicated for parents to offer feedback on the educational decision-making of their children's teachers. Think about it this way: many teachers are simply reproducing practices that they remember from their own childhood. Some are astounded to discover that other educators find these practices problematic because the overuse/misuse of film is a longstanding tradition in many American school settings.
But it's the plain truth that showing whole films is a strategy used by many teachers who don't have the imagination or skills to use classroom time more productively. It takes time to select and cue up clips. It takes imagination to set up engaging learning experiences that capitalize on the intense vitality of a Hollywood produced movie. (And students will always groan when you stop the film to start discussion!) School leaders need to promote more strategic use of video and expect that teachers invest time and energy into selecting and using video resources wisely and well.
I was very fortunate to be able to participate in the Second Congress of EUROMEDUC in Bellaria Italy in October, 2009. More than 200 educators, scholars, media professionals and policymakers gathered for three days of discussions, plenary presentations and workshops. Participants from more than 30 countries in Europe attended this important event, which was sponsored by CLEMI (France), Media Animation (Belgium), the University of Algarve (Portugal), and other groups.
One key theme was evident: All across Europe, there is growing momentum for the social reception of media literacy education, with key support from policymakers, politicians and cultural and educational leaders, providing meaningful opportunities for the growth of the field.
Teaching About Media & Teaching With Media
“There is no education that is not media education,” Suzanne Krucsay (Austria) reminded us. Jacques Piette (Canada) says it’s important to distinguish between media literacy and “education through media.” He is concerned that media literacy may lose its specificity if people confuse it with digital learning. However, others are more ambivalent about the dichotomy: Suzanne Krucsay finds that, for educators working in the context of traditional curriculum, the use of educational media can be combined with media literacy to challenge the authority of the textbook and help students understand the constructed nature of all media.
In the context of a traditional European curriculum at the secondary level, critical analysis of educational media can provide opportunities for students to develop media literacy competencies.
Participants offered varied forms of evidence to document the art and practice of media literacy education. This evidence showed that the practices of media literacy education can be transformative as students learn to engage in perspective taking, create messages, engage in inquiry, explore digital media, and participate in genuine dialogue that connects knowledge to action.
Still, some of the longstanding definitional issues surfaced during the conference. Educational leaders and policymakers are still debating some elements of the definition of media literacy education. Policy makers don’t like the term “critical” because it’s perceived as negative—but many conference participants pointed out it’s simply active, reflective thinking and practice. Cary Bazalgette (UK) argued that we need to step away from the term, media literacy and move towards conceptualizing our work as literacy. She argued that we are marginalizing ourselves by the label--- and that moving nearer to literacy educators can be a key agent to improve the quality of overall educational practice.
Media Literacy and Digital Learning
In many nations, there is a renewed emphasis on technology integration in schools. For example, the Italian Ministry of Education is working to place interactive whiteboards in every classroom. In Finland, the schools have invested heavily in bringing technology into schools. Pier Cesare Rivoltella (Italy) believes that this will result in one outcome: policy makers will discover that technology by itself will not work miracles. He offered ideas about how these strategies can be developed without reducing media literacy education to a set of mere skills or functional competencies. Media literacy educators provide a set of cultural content and pedagogy that connects technology integration to all the subject areas. There is a need to build bridges between media literacy and digital media while recognizing the distinct contributions of each.
As a means to connect media literacy with digital learning, Isabelle Breda (France) wants educators to challenge the uncritical use of technology in schools, which creates an “illusion of transparency.” She encourages educators to focus on increasing the transparency of media tools and technologies, for example, by questioning the forms and genres of online resource materials and teaching about how databases and search engines work.
Role of Media Industries in Media Literacy
EUROMEDUC leaders called for a “new alliance” between media industries and media literacy educators. A fascinating presentation on newspaper in education programs in Belgium, France and the Netherlands revealed the ways in which collaboration between media industries and government serve to support media literacy education.
But some participants are concerned about media industries that use the rhetoric of media literacy to sell software or cell phones. For example, Suzanne Krucsay believes that media literacy educators have been too optimistic about industry’s role in education and there was some debate about the need to find a way to “dance with the devil.” According to Pier Cesare Rivoltella, a position of resistance towards industry’s involvement in media literacy education will not be effective.
Issues of Assessment
Policymakers want assessment tools to document the development of media literacy education. Andrew Burn (UK) offered a session on evaluation/assessment in media literacy education, emphasizing the need to include media literacy within mother-tongue instruction. But he noted that assessment will never be a “one-size-fits-all” rubric, since media literacy education takes many forms, depending on social context, including the social class backgrounds of the learners.
In assessing media literacy in informal settings, Sezen Digdem (Turkey) offered a presentation comparing the development of an Istanbul film club over a period of eight years. When the film club began, it was a university-school partnership that included both critical analysis and production activities. But by 2009, the program had devolved to a production-only program, with no training support provided for students. As a result, students made bad copies of TV shows and “have fun” videos. More research is needed to develop criteria for establishing the quality of media literacy programs in the informal education sector.
What’s Needed: More Research on Media Literacy Theory and Practice
At the EUROMEDUC conference, there were 26 young scholars who offered “fiery presentations” about their research, as described by one senior scholar. These were a mix of theoretical and empirical studies. It is evidence that there is a vibrant community of young scholars working at the intersections of media studies and education all across Europe. Frederic Lambert (France) observed that there are a number of different scholarly disciplines and fields of study represented. In reflecting on the contributions of the young scholars, he wondered if, gradually, the field of media literacy education will develop some convergence in our assumptions about research methodologies, even across our disciplines and fields of study. We can only hope that the next generation of young scholars will lead the way!
Patrick Johnson and Erik Sakamoto, youth media educators at Youth Radio in Oakland, California, offered a day-long program, “Sports and Media Literacy” on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at Temple University. The program, “Health and Fitness Beat,” was developed through a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This new program engages young men of color in critical inquiry and reflection around a number of controversial topics in sports. The program uses principles of media literacy to address specific health-related issues with young men of color, including relationships, body image and sexuality.
The Youth Radio sports and media literacy program has three goals:
• building awareness about health issues that are relevant to young men of color
• increasing comfort in discussing sensitive topics, like sexuality, violence and homophobia
• developing critical thinking and communication skills
Among the 25 attendees of the September 19th program at Temple University were high school students and young adults participating in alternative education programs in the city, as well as Philadelphia educators who work in both formal K-12 and afterschool programs. There were a number of Temple University students and graduate students – some from as far away as Ontario, Canada.
Erik Sakamoto contextualized their work at Youth Radio. This program was developed specifically with incarcerated youth. Participating students came from a Camp Wilmont Sweeney, a juvenile detention center in Alameda County, California. It’s a community with the highest rate of reoffending juveniles of any state in the country. More than 90% of the "graduates" of California's youth incarceration system are rearrested within three years. These kids come from neighborhoods with a high incidence of community violence, drugs and crime, where chronic unemployment is the norm. East Oakland has the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases in the country. In every sense, young people participating in this program are not only perpetrators of crime—they are also victims of a dysfunctional culture.
Plenty of Philadelphia students could relate to these challenges. One participant said, “Growing up—it’s what I see every day, if someone gets shot, we see it as regular. We have to make a change in the way we see things.” Another said, “The mentality of being inside the ghetto can keep you strong. But if you hold on too tightly to that mentality, it’s not going to get you anywhere. You can keep the strength, but don’t let that limit you.
To explore how health and lifestyle issues connect to discussions about sports, we explored the concept of hypermasculinity, a psychological term for the exaggeration of male stereotypical behavior, such as an emphasis on strength, aggression, and virility. Marginalized communities of men may display attributes of hypermasculinity, especially when they experience oppressive conditions that “keep them in a box,” interfering with the ability to express their uniqueness and individuality.
We discussed a college football player, LeGarrette Blount, who shocked the football world earlier this year with a blindside attack on an opposing player after the Oregon Ducks' upset loss to Boise State. Blount sucker-punched Byron Hout after being taunted. The event was played over and over on the jumbotron in the stadium. Banned from the team for the season, he became undraftable and the event effectively ended his career.
Football is a profoundly violent sport. Players’ bodies are destroyed, and their life expectancy is shortened as a result of playing the game. In the United States, the average life span for NFL players is 55, more than two decades less than a typical male.
But athletes’ attitudes about aggression can be even more dangerous than the physical demands of the sport. When young men feel invincible, their response to threatening situations can be highly inappropriate. In Blount’s case, his response ended his career. In other situations, an aggressive response can lead to ending a life.
We then watched a clip about Vernon Forest, a world champion boxer who was killed during an attempted robbery while filling up tires on his car. Charles Watson, the boxer's manager, said police and witnesses told him that Forrest had stopped at a gas station to put air in his car tire when a man approached asking for money. Forrest's 11-year-old godson was with him.
Forest had his wallet out and a guy snatched his wallet and started running. Vernon pursued after him. The guy turned the corner and Forest didn't see him. He turned around to go back to the car. That's when the firing began.
Patrick Johnson asked, “How many of you know folks who probably could have been alive if they had not reacted to a situation in a certain way?” Hands went up all over the room. Sam Reed, a Philadelphia middle-school teacher said, “We don’t celebrate when kids make choices to NOT retaliate.”
Another teacher said, “How many times have we seen two kids get into a fight and the parents walk the kids back into a corner and continue the fight? We see that this is a generational transfer of hypermasculinity.”
A high school student shared a story, explaining, “One night, a person tried to get my wallet. I tried to fight him off. I got a scolding from my mom. I defended myself. But my mom and brother said, ‘You can never get your life back. ‘ But my pride was hurt. I wondered: Am I a punk?”
Patrick Johnson responded by explaining how many of our ideas about our own identity are shaped by media messages, often without our conscious awareness. Young men often feel invincible. Sometimes, they feel that their death is inevitable. Boxers experience these feelings just as a part of putting themselves in the ring each day. But the same mentality in the real world can be dangerous. As Johnson put it, “When I define myself as tough because I’m from this project or I’m from this neighborhood, I limit myself. We have to challenge this--- we have to flesh out all our identities and respect them all. In the case of Vernon Forest, he was not only a boxer, a world champion, and from Atlanta. He cared about the people in his community. He was a father and a godfather.“ But some identities trump other identities because of the power of media representations.
Hip-hop celebrates another kind of masculine ideal: one who is flashy, displaying power, money and women. One who brags about himself, maintains elaborate rivalries, and puts others down. Johnson asked the group, “How do hip hop and sports inter-relate?”
One student raised his hand, saying, “Little Wayne made a whole song comparing himself to Kobe Bryant.” Another participant explained, “If you see Jay Z liking Lebron, you will like Lebron.” An educator pointed out, “They’re both black—they have similar life stories and can relate to the struggle for success. Plus, consider the stress, clutch moment, the pressure--- rappers and ball players have this in common. Rappers couldn’t play ball, but they used other skills: talking, posturing, carrying themselves like a ball player.”
Patrick explained that historically, sports and entertainment were the first opportunities available to black men in mainstream society. In both cultural worlds, spectators and fans don’t usually see how much work, how much practice, how much effort is involved in getting to be good at the craft.
Instead, the focus is on looking flashy—and that’s what’s considered valuable. Johnson explained, “Both the world of hip hop and the world of sports has told us that looking good is important. Having a flashy look --- but does that really work? What are the consequences of a focus on this?"
We discussed the case of Alan Iverson, a talented player with a complex reputation for flashiness, both on and off the court. As one critic wrote:
In order for Iverson to be at his best, he needed to surrounded by inferior talent. He needed the ball, and he needed everyone else to play defense. And at his absolute apex, when he was surrounded by the perfect mix of players, he could only take a team to the doorstep — not all the way to a championship. For all the reasons Iverson was a joy to watch — his desire to take every big shot, finish every drive at the basket, initiate contact on every play, and wear his heart on his sleeve — his decline as a player hasn’t been fun to watch. He’s going out shooting, and his body is wearing down. His pride prevents him from making the transition to a role player, and as a result, he makes teams worse with his me-first approach.
After showing a highlight reel from ESPN, Patrick Johnson explained, “The top plays in ESPN sports center--- they are all over-the-top, bizarre things. From the media, we know a lot about marginal players who do wild things--- that’s what gets attention. When the culture emphasizes that, for young black males, it’s all about getting attention, those messages will have an effect on making responsible choices in everyday life. Asking a rhetorical question, Patrick Johnson asked, “Why is there a need to dominate and embarrass and put down others? How much of that, from a male perspective, do we buy into? And where does this lead? What are the real-world consequences?”
Participants experienced how viewing and discussing video clips about sports created an opportunity for sharing meaning and reflecting on attitudes, values and behaviors. When participants offered their reactions and interpretations, they also shared pockets of expertise—in music production, computers, BMX biking, skateboarding, and many more topics and issues. Everyone in the room benefitted from this sharing. One participant said, “When we share what’s important to us, it helps make a connection --- where each person has special knowledge that opens up conversations. This lets us understand people who might be different from us in gender, age and race. “
Media production is another important part of the program. Just having microphones in the room makes a difference, according to Johnson. Students take the work very seriously. In the program students are responsible for creating an individual audio commentary -- -an opinion piece with a personal perspective.
They also participate in a roundtable discussion, which is a debate with structure. Johnson explained the format of a roundtable discussion by pointing out that everybody has two or more different groups of friends. “When you are the host of the roundtable, you have to get them to talk to each other. You have to know how to create questions that work for each friend. You have to know how to cut someone off respectfully. “
Patrick Johnson revealed that it’s not always easy to get incarcerated young men to write commentaries. He said, “Kids have been conditioned to get the work done… it doesn’t have to be great.” But with Patrick as the editor, his strategy is simply to ask questions--- questions that need to be answered in the writing itself. “They add the answers to the new draft, and this deepens the writing.” In the process, students discover that revision and editing are not about some artificial ideas about “good writing.” Revision and editing are what happens when we think carefully about the relationship between the reader and the writer.
As Johnson understands it, the writing experience is a vital part of the program’s success. “They will need to be self-advocates in their careers,” he said. “To write a good commentary, they have to take a stance, and that’s not always easy for them.”
When they perform their commentaries to create an audio piece, “We watch as they become proud of what they have written.” It’s a satisfying job, Johnson acknowledges. “Trust is an important part of this program,” Patrick Johnson explained. “Sports is an umbrella for dialogue than enables us to listen to each other, to respect each other, and to explore the causes and consequences of the choices we make in life.”
Chris Sperry offered an engaging keynote presentation on media literacy education, sharing his experience as a high school English and Social Studies teacher at an alternative high school in Ithaca, New York.
Participants watched the final presentation of students who were enacting a UN debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Students were immersed in the identities they were playing. In role-playing the leaders of various stakeholder nations, they had mastered the some of the nuances of the various positions and points of view related to the conflict.
Chris also shared some of the highlights of the curriculum resources he developed to explore the representation of the Middle East, a topic that is dear to my heart. The Media Construction of War curriculum, developed by the Project Look Sharp team, is a comprehensive resource for high school social studies teachers. This curriculum explores a fundamental issue that drives our interest in news media literacy: exploring what we believe and why we believe it.
He showed an array of engaging activities that strengthen students' ability to analyze media messages. Over and over, Sperry offers his students creative ways to make meaning about media messages.
My favorite line in his speech went something like this: "Teaching can never be boring to me because it's always new-- it's new because I'm always listening to my kids, trying to understand how they are making sense of ideas in the world around them." This mirrors my own sentiments about the joys of teaching.
Because Chris creates a warm and respectful learning environment, he described how his students even deconstruct his own work. In one story, a student discussed Sperry's own writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying, "Your writing is biased." Perhaps it is, said Sperry. He asked the student to go home and make a list of the specific ways in which the writing was biased. The next day, the kid came back with a list of 11 ways the writing was biased towards Palestine. In response, Sperry whipped out a list of the 17 ways that writing was biased towards Israel! What a remarkable "aha" learning experience for that student!
Of course, Sperry reminds us, we teachers do bring our own attitudes into the classroom. He explains, "We must be clear that our primary goal is to help students think clearly and rigorously." Critically analyzing a McCain political ad but showing (and not analyzing) an Obama political ad--- this is bad classroom practice and reveals bias. It's why the concept of transparency is so powerful and important when it comes to the practice of teaching and learning.
Now, Sperry's students share resources using the Delicious social bookmarking website, annotating the materials they discover online. They tag websites so other students can use the resources they find. Using the Taking IT Global website, they engaged in dialogue with students in Palestine. Sharing ideas and resources increases students' active participation in contemporary news and current events issues.
Listening to students is a key to developing their critical thinking and communication skills; listening to teachers is the key to their professional development. But teachers also need resources, rich print and multimedia documents, aligned with the curriculum standards. Project Look Sharp's high quality curriculum resources are a treasure for K-12 educators nationwide!
Media literacy educators value self-reflection. Our values and commitments about peace and justice must be tempered by our ability to listen really carefully to our students' ideas. Sperry was proud to report the comments of a student who reflected on his own learning: "In most classes, I study equations. In this class, I was the equation."
Teachers have always recognized children's tendencies to imitate what they see on the mass media.
Today there's a new study out from Great Britain where teachers document the common practices of aggressive behavior, rudeness and inappropriate language that they see as related to media exposure. I've aleays wanted to do research on children's use of "catchphrases" that are popular in mass media--- and this article sure makes me want to see the Catherine Tate Show!
Aggressive behaviour among pupils was highlighted by 74% of those surveyed and sexually inappropriate behaviour by 43%.
A classroom teacher at a state primary school said pupils used the taglines and catchphrases from adult programmes. "Girls mimick the body language, conversations and attitudes towards other girls they see on Big Brother. When I asked them where they had ever seen anyone speaking to someone like that I was told they do it all the time on BB."
Other shows on teachers' hit lists were The Catherine Tate Show, where pupils used the catchphrases "Whatev-ah" and "Am I bovvered?" as regular retorts.